My college kid is home for the summer, and I slept the whole night for the first time in months. It was beginning to feel like he wasn’t real, just a dream of a fat little baby, a kid running on the beach, a teenager walking around with cats slung over his shoulders. The tech industry employment scene is crashing as AI has been introduced, and a lot of his classmates haven’t been able to get the internships that are required to graduate - him included - so we don’t know what will happen as they enter their last years without the co-op credits. Their academic advisor doesn’t know either, and just says, “uh, try again for next semester? Apply to more?” He’s applied to hundreds. Maybe the university will have to change their requirements, or maybe he’ll have to transfer to another university to graduate. It’s okay, he’s young enough to switch majors and do something else if he can read the writing on the wall (I would have, if I had a time machine to go back and warn myself). For right now, I’m just glad to have all my kids back at home.
Small time glitches have been happening. We went to my mother’s house for dinner on Sunday and found a strange car parked in her spot. Inside, we met two elves from Lothlorien - the nature commune in Indiana where we spent so many summers as I grew up, run by some of my mother’s closest friends. It’s one of those places where you can feel that natural kind of magic that exists in the world, with heavy sunlight, fireflies in the evenings, and raccoons that can unzip your tent and steal your marshmallows while you sleep. The founding members ran around mostly naked through the woods, building communal structures, tending gardens, and playing music. These girls were second-generation, with blue hair and gauzy tie-dyed clothes and witchy tattoos and little metal vape pens. They were in Hawaii for a wedding and stopped by with no warning, like visitors from ye olde 20th century, pre-cell phone. We put out a buffet of carnitas and taco fixings, sliced up the apple pie I brought, and caught up on stories over dinner. “The government finally found us, now we have to get rid of the composting toilets - which have been working just fine for 40 years, thank you - and put in flush toilets. Could be worse, at least it’s just toilets,” they said. There wasn’t enough time to hear everything in one evening, we all hugged and said goodbye when it started getting dark. It felt like we’d opened the door and walked into an Indiana summer, with old friends we’d never met, and it was a bit sad closing the door again and being back at home. The governor is making reluctant promises to give us hazard pay for working with the public during the lock down*, and now I am mentally spending my hypothetical lump sum on a chunk of forest by Lake George to start an artist’s colony in my retirement years.
It could happen.
And if I’m going to start an art commune, I’d better be able to teach something, so I watched a 10-hour demo on Dutch floral painting with Carlo Russo, and then ordered the brushes and panels on his materials list. The birch panels he uses are from a small husband and wife company in Pennsylvania, and you order them by calling up, chatting with the wife on the phone, reading out your credit card info, and then waiting with no email confirmation or tracking number for the panels to arrive by mail, not sure if they’re even coming at all or if you just handed over your entire bank account to an outlaw. It is a 1980s mail order adventure, checking your mailbox every day like a kid who sent in cereal box tops for a prize (which I did once, and I still have the blue limited-edition boy My Little Pony, who was hotly fought over by all my friends so he could be put in horrible situations and then rescued by the other ponies).
Also this week: the elementary school brought back their May Day program for the first time since the plague, and I walked down from the library to watch all the kids dance hula and twirl like little rotisserie chickens in the hot sun. It was really sweet, and I got a bit emotional seeing my first crop of storytime babies performing as big kids. Including my own, who is going into her last year in elementary, and looking forward to her first sleep-away camp this summer.
It's just a jump to the left
Feeling time sneaking up on me lately.
* don't get excited, he's also talking about cutting our pay by the same amount to pay for the Lahaina wildfire recovery that he's been messing up
Lovely catch-up post.
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